of course one shouldn't "dismiss good ideas just because you dislike the people saying them", but if your country doesn't already have a nuclear industry then it's too late to get to net zero with nuclear.
of course you can plan for using it later, but you can't get distracted by it now or fall victim to scams by well-funded and malicious groups.
> If more nuclear gets us away from Fossil Fuels faster it's a good thing
His point is that in Australia, it won’t. And it doesn’t matter how much evidence you put in front of these people to show them that. You can’t even tell them it’s costly because they reject even that provable fact.
Renewables plus firming is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than any form of nuclear ever will be in AU and getting cheaper every day to boot. To which the response will simply be “nuuhh uhhh”.
At least in the case of Australia, they’ll arrive at 100% renewables between 2030-2035 based on current deployment trajectories without any nuclear.
All of Australia has 18.4GW of coal generation capacity remaining (per ElectricityMaps.com). To replace this with solar, wind, and batteries will be trivial (China deployed 217GW of solar last year [2023], for comparison). There is already 40GW of batteries in their pipeline.
If more nuclear takes 20+ years to build while we can get wind farms online next month, is it really faster?
I love nuclear but have to admit it’s dead until we figure out how to build these things faster. You can get 10MW of wind built in 2 months. A nuclear plant gives you 1000MW (1GW). You need to build that in less than 50 months (4 years) to compete with wind. And wind can already deliver incremental value for most of those 50 months so lead times aren’t a problem.
When’s the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
Just comparing MW when wind is blowing is never going to be useful or result in a productive discussion. You need compare nuclear with other useful, base load generation methods in terms of build cost/time/CO2 per MW.
> At a 42% capacity factor (i.e., the average among recently built wind turbines in the United States, per the 2021 edition of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Land-Based Wind Market Report), that average turbine would generate over 843,000 kWh (843MWh) per month—enough for more than 940 average U.S. homes
For comparison, an actual nuclear reactor in practical use produced 4,697,675 MWh in 2017. That’s the equivalent of 5572 of those wind turbines.
That’s a lot of wind turbines. But if we can build 278 wind turbines per year and it takes 20 years to build a new reactor. They’re even.
> It doesn’t make much sense to compare the average outputs of wind vs nuclear unless you budget for a bunch of storage too.
It depends. If you're adding wind or nuclear to an already existing grid (which is usually the case), the already existing power plants can usually take over whenever the new power plants are offline or generating less power, and you don't need to budget for any extra storage. In these cases, the average output is the most relevant metric; it shows how much fuel (for a mostly fossil fuel grid) or water (for a mostly hydroelectric grid) it will save.
Possibly, but the discussion is about price per MW of nuclear vs wind, and I'm saying that's not a great comparison between generation types if you want power delivered all the time. 50% capacity is worth much less than 50% of the cost of 100% capacity.
It basically found that you can get close to 100% relatively easily with minimal storage (5 hours average demand).
The issue with getting over the mid-90s and to handle 100% is that you need to cater for the edge-cases (conditions that may occur 1-2 times per year max).
Either way from memory, LCOE (in $/MWH) for grid-scale solar is around 50-60, adding storage brings costs up to 80-120. Nuclear is in the range of 200-300+, so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward. Especially when you can build them and scale them up quickly (compared to 10-15 years of nuclear builds).
> so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward
Possibly, but nuclear TCO is also extremely well understood, and it's possible that the TCO for these new systems is not. I'd say the error bars are likely to be much longer on the renewables for the next 20 years or so, as we flush out the details.
Thanks for the more in-depth analysis. It's interesting. But my point - which I didn't really say clearly enough - is: you can't only compare MW, which is what a lot of these calculations tend to do, even if you scale provides for capacity. The fact that nuclear (or any base load provider) works all the time makes it much, much more valuable than something that works intermittently.
> The fact that nuclear (or any base load provider) works all the time
It doesn't; for instance, the nuclear reactors near where I live have to power down for a whole month once every year, for refueling and maintenance. That's around a 92% capacity factor.
Yes and nuclear is much more compact. Wind farms take up lots of space.
It’s a shame we aren’t building more smaller reactors quicker. I think it would solve a lot of the problems that come from treating every plant as a unique one off megaproject.
Yep, agreed, it's pretty much dead, unless the SMR people can figure out the low-end. There's a reason why our anti-nuclear friend directed his vitriol there, lol.
That said, I hear that China is building nuclear. We might be able to import the know-how, or develop the political will to spin ours back up. A bit of national jealously goes a long way.
> When’s the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
South Korea is one of the world leaders in commercial nuclear power, and as of 20 years ago they were able to build plants in under 5 years[0]. Seems like recent construction has slowed down there as well, for reasons unknown to me.
It's not dead. It shares skills and industrial capacity with the military. For countries that have nukes or want an option to build some in a hurry, they want nukes.
The sheer expense just means it's vastly too expensive to do anything about climate change.
The military industrial complex will still try to sell it as better or at least equivalent to solar and wind though - and people will buy it.
> Wind farms deliver nada when the wind does not blow. The unsolved problem of intermittency.
The province of Ontario has a respectable wind infrastructure, but quite often in the middle of heat waves (when demand is high, because air conditioning is needed to help people keep cool/alive) the wind often does not blow.
Solar would be useful for supply in summer, but it's not useful at night obviously (when it can be cooler, but still hot (>30C)).
> If more nuclear takes 20+ years to build while we can get wind farms online next month, is it really faster?
Building (roughly) plants 1 through 3 will be the hardest, take the longest, and cost the most, but after that—assuming you use the same design throughout—you can build quite quickly. Japan averaged ~5 years between beginning of construction and commercial operations:
He said they were people who were provably lying about the very existence of the problem that they now claim nuclear will fix (in 2 decades, at great expense).
Any political cause larger than a certain size will have someone stinky in the big tent. There are stinkers in the renewables tent too, does that mean we should boycott solar panels? Of course not. Same here.
This is not "some" -the majority of Australian nuclear backers are the mining sector, the established mining lobby, and the right wing. The socialist case for nuclear exists ("electricity plus soviet power == communism"), but is not being made.
Here's a leading hint: the main campaign page in Australia for the pro nuclear push is the Murdoch press. The political party leading the push is the conservative party, and it is being led by the right wing conservative leadership against the wishes of the middle ground and soft-left side of the party.
You aren't wrong that any movement has some stink: this movement is lead by the nose.
It's a completely fair assessment of the current political embrace of nuclear power in Australia - it's being pushed more and more by Murdoch, his papers and Sky arms, and the most Vogon of the Australian political landscape, and they very much have a blind to climate realities "this is the fix" agenda.
The great problem with that is it drowns out any chance for any considered debate on the future of Australia's energy mix - there is an engineering case for a small percentage ( <10% ) of nuclear generation in parts of the Australian grid.
Whilst I personally would have no problem with lifting the bans, state and federal, I would personally have a problem with the subsidies required to make commercial builds come out of the woodwork.
Nuclear in OZ is estimated at ~$300+ compared to $150+ for firmed renewables as a "unit cost" and we can be confident of the renewables cost because it's been experienced while the Nuclear one is speculative and as has been pointed out in this HN thread, highly subject to cost overruns in legal and construction delays
(the size of the unit isn't the point, the difference in the outcome in terms of charges to be recovered from the system is)
If in the future SMR prove economically viable and we can save on transmission line builds to have some serving major cities, I'd be fine. I would have no problem living near one, or near ANSTO's lucas heights facility.
The current "go nuke" campaign in the Oz has nothing to do with energy, and a lot to do with increasing shareholder value and in objectifying the labor/green parties as "anti technology" and even "anti working class" if you define the working class as engineers and miners, not hairdressers and farmers
> The current "go nuke" campaign in the Oz has nothing to do with energy,
Yep - purely political, in many ways Australia simply doesn't have the breadth or depth of skills here to efficiently carry this off; I'd be happy to see "drop in" pre built "Westinghouse" reactors ( insert appropriate company ).
There's much in parallel here with Australia's other current nuclear debacle:
> there is an engineering case for a small percentage ( <10% ) of nuclear generation in parts of the Australian grid.
Is there though?
The global percentage required is about that, and is mostly existing nuclear plants.
And every year the projections for renewables tick upwards, leaving less room for anything else. So by the time any new nuclear actually arrives it'll be even less needed.
And that's global, where industries already exist, working plants already exist, and where some small percentage of people live in near polar regions.
on another sidenote, it's important to be extremely cynical about people claiming that all nuclear is being pushed to the exclusion of other things. This straw man is made of straw.
I'm glad that after 40 years renewables are finally viable as a nuclear alternative... but if we just hadn't stopped building nuclear and continued building at the same pace (no learning curves assumed) we would already be done decarbonizing the grid! It takes some really special thinking to call that a grift. Instead, we are just starting to decarbonize, and with 100 gigatons of extra CO2 in the atmosphere from US emissions alone. I am glad we are un-stuck, but gee, I have a really hard time chalking up the concerted effort to kill nuclear and keep it dead as a "win."
I don't know much about the politics of this in Australia, but at you have uranium exports already, wouldn't it be an ideal country to build nuclear power?
Coal and gas are major domestic industries and major export earners for Australia, so for a very long time it was a) political suicide to do anything that undermined them and b) simply way too expensive to bring nuclear power into the baseload mix compared to fossil-fuel plants. So the government wasn't going to subsidize it and private industry couldn't make a decent ROI on it.
A decade ago Australia repealed its emissions trading scheme, which would have made nuclear much more competitive economically. If the politics at the time were different, and a strong carbon market brough nuclear power into the conversation then, some large plants might be nearing completion this decade. They'd be a reasonable chance to make a serious contribution to decarbonizing Australia's energy mix.
But it's only in 2022 that the Australian population elected a government that took climate change seriously. With the timing of the net-zero pledges the new government has put in place, it seems like it's just far too late to put nuclear into the mix without paying hefty premiums for speed of completion.
Finally, Australia is physically very large but the population is relatively small. Less than one-twelfth of the US population, less than half of the UK or France's population. It might simply be too small of an economy to establish a domestic nuclear engineering industry and training pipeline. If that's true, it'd be a very tough sell telling people it's time to pay extra on their power bill or taxes to stand up a nuclear industry from scratch ... and most of that money will go to foreign companies and immigrant SMEs.
Australia is big into mining - dig a hole, put the contents of the hole on a ship to a country that puts more effort into things, cash the cheques. actually doing things with the contents of the whole is a lot of work and requires whole industries full of expertise and training pipelines and industrial policy, so it's easier to just dig holes->ship contents of holes. even owning the mining companies is not a popular hobby - much better to sell out to a big foreign company and take the cash, then they can worry about even the hole digging.
if you've ever heard of the Resource Curse, Australia is one of the rare Rich Western Country victims of it - it's all too easy, and so everything else gets left by the wayside. and then the mining industry is rich, so has lots of lobbyists and pet politicians who cement it's power - even easy things like a Mining Super Profit Tax that would have just cut some of the profits that got sent overseas to fund developing other parts of the economy got scaremongered by a huge mining industry lobbying push and never happened.
we are very very fucked if mining stops being easy and/or profitable.
> wouldn't it be an ideal country to build nuclear power?
nope!
a few reasons:
- it's a small population - less than a tenth the population of the US. having a nuclear power industry has enormous fixed costs. you need a web of companies that work on the various bits, you need universities and apprenticeships churning out experts, you need absolutely fucking enormous government subsidies, and you need to do that for decades.
- Australian politicians are - partly because of the above - very used to not working hard, so trying to convince people that they need to pay even more for electricity to subsidise a new nuclear power industry - and like mining above, that's almost entirely going to be going to foreign companies.
- renewables are absolutely fucking easy and cheap and quick. Australia is the size of western europe or nearly as big as the main bit of the USA, so you can just deploy thousands of square kilometers of solar panels or wind, across multiple timezones, across multiple climactic regions, etc. nonetheless, people whinge about this, including actual real federal ministers claiming that wind turbines on farms are "eyesores".
- it's too late - even countries that have nuclear reactors take decades to build them, so starting now, even with political will and competence, would take, say, twenty years to turn the first one on. Australia needs to be net zero before then. so if people want to argue about deploying nuclear power in Australia, then go for it, but it needs to 1) not delay actual work now, which will mass deployment of renewables and storage and 2) it needs a plan to compete with renewables costs in 2050. saying "oh hey, let's do nuclear, it'll cost way more and won't be here until your grandkids are born, also you'll be subsidising it" is a very very poor sales pitch.
The flip-side is of course Germany, globally praised for being the shiny beacon of green energy policy, while emitting almost twice as much CO2 as neighboring nuclear-happy France (per capita).
In the end, I think we should remember what is the most important: CO2 emission. Other things are secondary.
The Germans, due to their long history of massive earthquakes and destructive tsunamis, have, in their usual rational manner, shut down their nuclear power stations and instead rely on soft coal and importing power from coal powered Poland and nuclear powered France.
What a world to live in, where the right wing is the one which pays attention to reality and the left ignores it.
A bit like the fact that immigration in Australia is now the main reason the RBA is driving interest rates into territory that will create a ressession because the government has set impossible to sustain immigration targets and told us as much: https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/migration-surge-adds-to-i...
> people pushing nuclear to the exclusion of other things
Which is absolutely not happening here- the forecast balance being discussed in TFA is nuclear as a 10% foundation of largely renewable future.
On another sidenote, it's important to be extremely cynical about people re-framing pragmatic discussions about low level nuclear usage as "nuclear to the exclusion of other things".
Australia currently has vast amounts of renewables, and has a future that will see generation of exported renewable power for SE Asia .. and yet there is a place in Australia for base nuclear power to replace a small part of base gas and coal - and that's the opinion of someone who's accepted AGW models since the early 1980s and rarely votes for the Australian right.
That is overly cynical. It was a genuine effort to get the nuclear industry going in Australia; the Liberals have been angling towards it for a while.
* Australia is one of the most anti-nuclear-power countries in the world. At this point we're one of the few advanced countries left that doesn't have a nuclear reactor connected to the power grid. We're behind the curve on this and we should be looking at building up local experience in nuclear power.
* The right wing of Australia has been cautiously pro-nuclear since the Howard government and do little probes from time to time to see if the left have calmed down about advanced technology enough to build one yet.
* There is a lot of overlap between people who think the climate change people are not genuine and the pro-nuclear people ... but that is because the pro nuclear people have been pointing out the obvious solution from 1980 to 2020 to air pollution issues has been nuclear power and the green parties are one of the most vocal lobbies against it.
There are obvious financial risks to nuclear power, but Australia should at least enter the 20th century and have it on the table as an option. Our current policy is stupid.
> tl;dr at least some parts of the pro-nuclear-power lobby is actually just trying to end efforts to minimise climate change damage.
That is ridiculous; there is no such group. Australia doesn't even cause any climate change damage to minimise - accepting that as the goal, our contribution to global emissions rounds to zero, and we have no leadership on any useful technologies because our manufacturing sector has been knocked out of competition (arguably our terrible energy policies were one of the big contributors to this, although wages were a decisive factor).
Whether pro or anti nuclear, one paper I feel every engineer should read is “Do Artifacts have Politics” that asks the question “divorced from creator or user intent, do inventions/technologies/artifacts contain and/or promote a political will”. Here’s a link https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf (hint, the answer is “yes” but the journey is more important than the destination).
It’s a surprisingly easy read too. More like a long blog post than a dry paper. One of the examples in there is nuclear technologies, which is what brings this up for me.
It reminded me of a lot of themes present in my design education, of political downstream effects created by apparently neutral technical decisions, and therefore the inherent responsibility of creators when putting something into the world.
Not just standard economic externalities but consequences for human interaction.
I'm trying to imagine artifacts that demonstrate/embed a set of politics and values in a blatant way (i.e. appalling the reader) just to prove the point that such things are possible.
For example, a whip specially-designed for the convenience of some humans to inflict coercive pain on others who can't fight back.
Or for a more sci-fi bent, imagine an array of mass-produced devices which can reduce a planetary ecosystem into decaying goo while simultaneously reporting on buried ore veins. It tells you something about the likely values and activities of those who would create and use it.
This indeed felt like a excelent overview of many deeper wells that engineers are bound to have to dive into. That could be the best explaination of why we fundamentally don't solve social issues with purely technical solutions, they're always intertwined.
Robert Mose is mentionned midway, so I'd point out that the 99 percent invisible podcast is currently doing a book club on "The Power Broker" [0]. A lot of the issues touched here are inherently design issues, and I think the whole podcast would be a feast for anyone interested.
I don’t agree that artifacts have politics the way magical objects in Toklien’s world are imbued with meaning or will. I do however agree that some technologies tend to encourage certain politics.
It’s always been puzzling to me that so many libertarian types love nuclear, which is a technology that tends to encourage big centralized systems and therefore big centralized powers (for many reasons). Solar and wind are much more amenable to decentralized voluntary fluid modes of social organization.
I guess small modular nukes would be better this way, but they still require a lot of security and life cycle management that tends to encourage large centralized administrative power.
"Net zero" is pretty much the accepted term for the concept of balancing out emissions with reductions. The U.N.[1] uses it, the E.U.[2] uses it, the U.S.[3] uses it. The ISP lost that one!
To me nuclear is like those big iron servers of 90's losing to the horizontally scaled "datacenters" of solar panels and wind generators. Generic economics, physics, network and other considerations, when all the domain specific peculiarities are abstracted away, seem to be very similar.
Except, Wind and geothermal are more space efficient than nuclear when you look at the actual land use of current nuclear reactors. In theory it doesn’t need much space so several GW could sit on a few hundred acres. Yet, Wolf Creek Generating Station is only 1.2 GW on 9,818 acres that’s worse than many solar projects.
Which seems to be the general issue with the Nuclear industry. In theory you can say all these wonderful things, but in practice people are looking at decades of results when they are choosing to invest or not.
Nuclear doesn’t need technological breakthroughs from cutting edge research, that just leads to more delays and boondoggles. What it actually needs is efficiently run projects on time and under budget.
‘Seems off’ is an odd way of dismissing an actual example. In theory it wins every time, in the real world it doesn’t.
So sure, nuclear sometimes uses less land than solar nobody is seriously doubting it, the issue is it isn’t guaranteed and wind and geothermal are both vastly better from a land use perspective. Those 15 MW wind turbines don’t prevent people from farming beneath them, good luck doing anything that productive with land that close to a nuclear reactor.
You’re looking at the distance between turbines as if that land was useless for anything else. It’s not.
Put a turbine in the on a 10,000 acre farm and you’ll still have a 9,999 acre farm. Put a nuclear reactor on that same land and you’ll be doing a lot less farming.
A 2015 report, “Land Requirements for Carbon-Free Technologies,” compared the land area that various types of electricity generation facilities would require to produce the same amount of electricity as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in a year. The results highlight the exemplary performance reliability of nuclear energy facilities as well as the very high energy density of nuclear fuel.
A nuclear energy facility has a small area footprint, requiring about 1.3 square miles per 1,000 megawatts of installed capacity. This figure is based on the median land area of the 59 nuclear plant sites in the United States. In addition, nuclear energy facilities have an average capacity factor of 90 percent, much higher than intermittent sources like wind and solar.
Wind farms require up to 360 times as much land area to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear energy facility, a Nuclear Energy Institute analysis has found. Solar photovoltaic (PV) facilities require up to 75 times the land area.
Gee I wonder how much land they are actually occupying. Or wowzers let’s talk about offshore wind farms…
They’re using a definition that makes sense in one context and then applying it in a different context where it’s meaningless. Grid operators dislike base load power, the term is actually referring to a downside that it’s pricey to turn off. Now outside of that context it sure sounds great to pair with unreliable renewable energy. Except the downside still exists and you lose lots of money when you turn it off making it a terrible option when paired with renewable energy.
> They’re using a definition that makes sense in one context and then applying it in a different context where it’s meaningless.
Much as you yourself have down above where the amount of land owned by a company surrounding a nuclear plant is conflated to be the amount of land required by a nuclear plant.
To be clear, I picture a hybrid energy future and can easily link to pictures of sheep grazing under solar panels - I can also link to pictures of large scale solar farms that directly place solar panels on the ground, and others that elevate the panels but have no dual use of the land.
> Much as you yourself have down above where the amount of land owned by a company surrounding a nuclear plant is conflated to be the amount of land required by a nuclear plant.
No, they own/control more land, this is specifically the amount used by the nuclear power plant.
“It occupies 9,818 acres (39.73 km2) of the total 11,800 acres (4,800 ha) controlled by the owner.”
The fenced off area patrolled by armed guards isn’t freely available for other uses. Believe me if they could sell off 5,000 acres to build a subdivision the company would happily pocket that money but no the land really is being used.
One might ask why a 1977 nuclear plant that produces relatively low power has such a large security perimeter ... that is orthogonal to power production.
Required is a weasel word in infrastructure, there’s often more expensive alternatives but what matters is what’s actually built not what in theory could be. Build a nuclear submarine and the land use drops, except the costs go up it isn’t a viable option.
In this case walls cost more money than an empty field, both give you time to shoot someone trying to cross them and they went with the cheapest option. Thus the land is in use and cannot be used for a city park or whatnot.
> Why do you insist on using it as a "typical" case when it clearly isn't?
Never said typical it’s literally the second on a list. It’s one of the few locations I’ve seen over 4,000 acres so it’s not typical, though presumably I didn’t randomly find the worst example and most didn’t include the area.
Edit: 12,000 acres + a 7,000-acre reservoir, which eliminates the need for cooling towers though it’s got 2 reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Nuclear_Generating... if you include the water behind the dam I think it’s 19,000 acres generating 2.56 net GW, exclude the water and that goes up but presumably dams also get much more land efficient.
Poking around, you can find various justifications for sites needing more or less land. Palo Verde needs a 85-acre and a 45 acre artificial ponds because of its location in a desert. Anything located near a large body of water gets that for ‘free’ and can also make use of the water as part of its security zone a double win, though not quite as much as a wind farms in the ocean. Add in multiple reactors on one location and you can really jump up the density.
Poking around at the other end there’s much smaller reactors on big sites. China has one 200MW reactor on a site with multiple planned future reactors... Which is the thing, the real world is messy you can’t just think in terms of typical or hypothetical but what’s actually used. And of course each of these sites generated zero power for years under construction and will also generate zero power for years or even decades while being decommissioned/decontaminated.
Nuclear drops down to within the same order of magnitude of the best solar, when you take exclusion zones into account(according to Vaclav Smil in Power Density). But solar (and certainly) wind couldn’t be called more space efficient overall.
Turbines limit how close other turbines can be located, but nothing stops you using that land for other purposes. Nobody is going to complain their corn, cows, or house aren’t seeing high wind speeds.
Meanwhile the plant operator would strongly object to someone building their house inside the exclusion zone, that land is actually occupied.
Which solar projects? Based on this https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf (2013) report the the smallest number I find is 2 acres/GWh/year. That's direct land use (ie. only the landuse directly below the panels) for "2-axis tracked CPV" plants (granted, an average). Total landuse is 2.8 for the same type of plants.
The Wolf Creek station come in at 1.02 acres/GWh/year (based on 90% capacity factor)
There is no discussion of power without knowing the:
1) current state of LCOE costs of different power generation methods
2) future LCOE evolution/drop in the relevant power generation methods
"Without nuclear, advocates say, we would need to build far more wind and solar power plants to ensure reliable supplies, doubling or tripling costs over power networks that include nuclear."
Look, if you look at last years Lazard's LCOE report, incumbent nuclear is 5x to 6x as expensive as wind and solar. So, uh, yeah, its cheaper to overproduce capacity than build nuclear. That's from point 1: the CURRENT state of LCOE.
For "new nuclear" to enter the equation in current regulatory politics and costs, it won't power up any new plants for about 10 years.
The second point about LCOE comes into play: solar/wind are STILL DROPPING in cost, and almost more significantly, grid storage will probably see the sodium-ion battery and perhaps the sodium-sulfur battery in that time, dropping storage costs by at least 50%, perhaps 80-90%.
Solar cells will likely see some multijunction silicon-perovskite cell come into production, and possibly a full perovskite cell, in addition to increased economies of scale. I would predict in 10 years the cost of a solar cell is effectively 1/3 to 1/5 of current day prices (inflation adjusted yada yada).
Wind will likely be less revolutionary, but I suspect it will drop still another 50-70% in 10 years.
Meanwhile, this is for nuke plants 10 years out, that really don't have new gen designs ready to go. I will be kind and say plants we started funding now are only 4x as expensive as current solar/wind. But by the time they get built, they will probably be 10x as expensive.
I'm sorry, I love nuclear power, it is so cool. But the nuclear industry needed to solve its problems about 20-40 years ago. It's leadership could have embraced global warming decades ago, but the leadership of nuclear is staunchly conservative, owing to a seething resentment of regulation and government oversight.
I believe there exists, possibly a LFTR, a scalable, cheap, safe, near-zero waste reactor design that can be deployed as industrial power generation and perhaps competitive grid power, when combined with regulatory reforms in the goverment.
But that design and reforms needed to happen about 25 years ago.
Now nuclear needs to hold onto its existing plants, research new reactors (US National Labs have started new nuclear research including LFTRs, again, about 25 years too late), and prepare for when solar/wind stabilize in costs such that a price can be targeted with a true new generation design.
As for grid leveling, old gen nuclear doesn't switch on or off fast enough (LFTR can, maybe pebble bed can too), but it could do "three days of storms" generation. But it still isn't as useful as say natural gas turbine for that (which obviously releases carbon).
Alas the LFTR/MSR design is still unproven for a long term industrial standpoint, and has numerous materials issues. China has an MSR up supposedly for a year or two.
It is true that regulatory barriers, NIMBY, and other politics increase costs and delay projects in nuclear, but this is also a convenient boogeyman for them to point to. If only the "magic regulatory framework" existed to let nuclear projects freely be built then... costs would still be higher than everything but coal.
The LWR just isn't competitive, and I suspect any non-breeding design that can't also transmute waste to usable fuel (LFTR can supposedly do this, I think some other breeder reactors can as well). Because waste solid fuel is either expensive to transport and "dispose" at Yucca and is a whole entire extra bunch of NIMBYism and regulatory oversight, or difficult to reform/reprocess into new fuel.
LWR only works on a small portion of Uranium ore, and even when the rods are formed from that fissile Uranium, only a fraction of the...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadIf more nuclear gets us away from Fossil Fuels faster it's a good thing
of course one shouldn't "dismiss good ideas just because you dislike the people saying them", but if your country doesn't already have a nuclear industry then it's too late to get to net zero with nuclear.
of course you can plan for using it later, but you can't get distracted by it now or fall victim to scams by well-funded and malicious groups.
His point is that in Australia, it won’t. And it doesn’t matter how much evidence you put in front of these people to show them that. You can’t even tell them it’s costly because they reject even that provable fact.
Renewables plus firming is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than any form of nuclear ever will be in AU and getting cheaper every day to boot. To which the response will simply be “nuuhh uhhh”.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ene...
All of Australia has 18.4GW of coal generation capacity remaining (per ElectricityMaps.com). To replace this with solar, wind, and batteries will be trivial (China deployed 217GW of solar last year [2023], for comparison). There is already 40GW of batteries in their pipeline.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/12/coal-will-be-a...
https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/integr...
https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/australia-leads-globa...
I love nuclear but have to admit it’s dead until we figure out how to build these things faster. You can get 10MW of wind built in 2 months. A nuclear plant gives you 1000MW (1GW). You need to build that in less than 50 months (4 years) to compete with wind. And wind can already deliver incremental value for most of those 50 months so lead times aren’t a problem.
When’s the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
Here’s a better number: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-homes-can-average-wind-tu...
> At a 42% capacity factor (i.e., the average among recently built wind turbines in the United States, per the 2021 edition of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Land-Based Wind Market Report), that average turbine would generate over 843,000 kWh (843MWh) per month—enough for more than 940 average U.S. homes
For comparison, an actual nuclear reactor in practical use produced 4,697,675 MWh in 2017. That’s the equivalent of 5572 of those wind turbines.
That’s a lot of wind turbines. But if we can build 278 wind turbines per year and it takes 20 years to build a new reactor. They’re even.
USA currently builds 3000 turbines per year. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-wind-turbines-are-install...
So I think even with 42% capacity, wind is winning. We’d need to build 10 reactors per 20 years (1 every 2 years) for nuclear to beat wind.
It depends. If you're adding wind or nuclear to an already existing grid (which is usually the case), the already existing power plants can usually take over whenever the new power plants are offline or generating less power, and you don't need to budget for any extra storage. In these cases, the average output is the most relevant metric; it shows how much fuel (for a mostly fossil fuel grid) or water (for a mostly hydroelectric grid) it will save.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
It basically found that you can get close to 100% relatively easily with minimal storage (5 hours average demand).
The issue with getting over the mid-90s and to handle 100% is that you need to cater for the edge-cases (conditions that may occur 1-2 times per year max).
Either way from memory, LCOE (in $/MWH) for grid-scale solar is around 50-60, adding storage brings costs up to 80-120. Nuclear is in the range of 200-300+, so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward. Especially when you can build them and scale them up quickly (compared to 10-15 years of nuclear builds).
Possibly, but nuclear TCO is also extremely well understood, and it's possible that the TCO for these new systems is not. I'd say the error bars are likely to be much longer on the renewables for the next 20 years or so, as we flush out the details.
It doesn't; for instance, the nuclear reactors near where I live have to power down for a whole month once every year, for refueling and maintenance. That's around a 92% capacity factor.
Wind turbines have additional maintenance downtime too.
It’s a shame we aren’t building more smaller reactors quicker. I think it would solve a lot of the problems that come from treating every plant as a unique one off megaproject.
That said, I hear that China is building nuclear. We might be able to import the know-how, or develop the political will to spin ours back up. A bit of national jealously goes a long way.
South Korea is one of the world leaders in commercial nuclear power, and as of 20 years ago they were able to build plants in under 5 years[0]. Seems like recent construction has slowed down there as well, for reasons unknown to me.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea
The sheer expense just means it's vastly too expensive to do anything about climate change.
The military industrial complex will still try to sell it as better or at least equivalent to solar and wind though - and people will buy it.
The province of Ontario has a respectable wind infrastructure, but quite often in the middle of heat waves (when demand is high, because air conditioning is needed to help people keep cool/alive) the wind often does not blow.
Solar would be useful for supply in summer, but it's not useful at night obviously (when it can be cooler, but still hot (>30C)).
Building (roughly) plants 1 through 3 will be the hardest, take the longest, and cost the most, but after that—assuming you use the same design throughout—you can build quite quickly. Japan averaged ~5 years between beginning of construction and commercial operations:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
France build 58 reactors in 25 years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France%27s_civil_nu...
It helps if you don't start and stop projects/plants: many cost over-runs are because of wishy-washy decision making.
> When’s the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
2004 to 2009 is five, Tomari 3 in Japan:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomari_Nuclear_Power_Plant
He said they were people who were provably lying about the very existence of the problem that they now claim nuclear will fix (in 2 decades, at great expense).
See also: think of the children.
Here's a leading hint: the main campaign page in Australia for the pro nuclear push is the Murdoch press. The political party leading the push is the conservative party, and it is being led by the right wing conservative leadership against the wishes of the middle ground and soft-left side of the party.
You aren't wrong that any movement has some stink: this movement is lead by the nose.
The great problem with that is it drowns out any chance for any considered debate on the future of Australia's energy mix - there is an engineering case for a small percentage ( <10% ) of nuclear generation in parts of the Australian grid.
Nuclear in OZ is estimated at ~$300+ compared to $150+ for firmed renewables as a "unit cost" and we can be confident of the renewables cost because it's been experienced while the Nuclear one is speculative and as has been pointed out in this HN thread, highly subject to cost overruns in legal and construction delays
(the size of the unit isn't the point, the difference in the outcome in terms of charges to be recovered from the system is)
If in the future SMR prove economically viable and we can save on transmission line builds to have some serving major cities, I'd be fine. I would have no problem living near one, or near ANSTO's lucas heights facility.
The current "go nuke" campaign in the Oz has nothing to do with energy, and a lot to do with increasing shareholder value and in objectifying the labor/green parties as "anti technology" and even "anti working class" if you define the working class as engineers and miners, not hairdressers and farmers
> The current "go nuke" campaign in the Oz has nothing to do with energy,
Yep - purely political, in many ways Australia simply doesn't have the breadth or depth of skills here to efficiently carry this off; I'd be happy to see "drop in" pre built "Westinghouse" reactors ( insert appropriate company ).
There's much in parallel here with Australia's other current nuclear debacle:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/25/aukus-nuclear-submarine...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
Is there though?
The global percentage required is about that, and is mostly existing nuclear plants.
And every year the projections for renewables tick upwards, leaving less room for anything else. So by the time any new nuclear actually arrives it'll be even less needed.
And that's global, where industries already exist, working plants already exist, and where some small percentage of people live in near polar regions.
Australia has none of that.
I think this is probably true. Their reasons for promoting nuclear power have nothing to do with that.
I'm glad that after 40 years renewables are finally viable as a nuclear alternative... but if we just hadn't stopped building nuclear and continued building at the same pace (no learning curves assumed) we would already be done decarbonizing the grid! It takes some really special thinking to call that a grift. Instead, we are just starting to decarbonize, and with 100 gigatons of extra CO2 in the atmosphere from US emissions alone. I am glad we are un-stuck, but gee, I have a really hard time chalking up the concerted effort to kill nuclear and keep it dead as a "win."
A decade ago Australia repealed its emissions trading scheme, which would have made nuclear much more competitive economically. If the politics at the time were different, and a strong carbon market brough nuclear power into the conversation then, some large plants might be nearing completion this decade. They'd be a reasonable chance to make a serious contribution to decarbonizing Australia's energy mix.
But it's only in 2022 that the Australian population elected a government that took climate change seriously. With the timing of the net-zero pledges the new government has put in place, it seems like it's just far too late to put nuclear into the mix without paying hefty premiums for speed of completion.
Finally, Australia is physically very large but the population is relatively small. Less than one-twelfth of the US population, less than half of the UK or France's population. It might simply be too small of an economy to establish a domestic nuclear engineering industry and training pipeline. If that's true, it'd be a very tough sell telling people it's time to pay extra on their power bill or taxes to stand up a nuclear industry from scratch ... and most of that money will go to foreign companies and immigrant SMEs.
nope!
Australia is big into mining - dig a hole, put the contents of the hole on a ship to a country that puts more effort into things, cash the cheques. actually doing things with the contents of the whole is a lot of work and requires whole industries full of expertise and training pipelines and industrial policy, so it's easier to just dig holes->ship contents of holes. even owning the mining companies is not a popular hobby - much better to sell out to a big foreign company and take the cash, then they can worry about even the hole digging.
if you've ever heard of the Resource Curse, Australia is one of the rare Rich Western Country victims of it - it's all too easy, and so everything else gets left by the wayside. and then the mining industry is rich, so has lots of lobbyists and pet politicians who cement it's power - even easy things like a Mining Super Profit Tax that would have just cut some of the profits that got sent overseas to fund developing other parts of the economy got scaremongered by a huge mining industry lobbying push and never happened.
we are very very fucked if mining stops being easy and/or profitable.
> wouldn't it be an ideal country to build nuclear power?
nope!
a few reasons:
- it's a small population - less than a tenth the population of the US. having a nuclear power industry has enormous fixed costs. you need a web of companies that work on the various bits, you need universities and apprenticeships churning out experts, you need absolutely fucking enormous government subsidies, and you need to do that for decades.
- Australian politicians are - partly because of the above - very used to not working hard, so trying to convince people that they need to pay even more for electricity to subsidise a new nuclear power industry - and like mining above, that's almost entirely going to be going to foreign companies.
- renewables are absolutely fucking easy and cheap and quick. Australia is the size of western europe or nearly as big as the main bit of the USA, so you can just deploy thousands of square kilometers of solar panels or wind, across multiple timezones, across multiple climactic regions, etc. nonetheless, people whinge about this, including actual real federal ministers claiming that wind turbines on farms are "eyesores".
- it's too late - even countries that have nuclear reactors take decades to build them, so starting now, even with political will and competence, would take, say, twenty years to turn the first one on. Australia needs to be net zero before then. so if people want to argue about deploying nuclear power in Australia, then go for it, but it needs to 1) not delay actual work now, which will mass deployment of renewables and storage and 2) it needs a plan to compete with renewables costs in 2050. saying "oh hey, let's do nuclear, it'll cost way more and won't be here until your grandkids are born, also you'll be subsidising it" is a very very poor sales pitch.
In the end, I think we should remember what is the most important: CO2 emission. Other things are secondary.
A bit like the fact that immigration in Australia is now the main reason the RBA is driving interest rates into territory that will create a ressession because the government has set impossible to sustain immigration targets and told us as much: https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/migration-surge-adds-to-i...
Or that Australia has been in a per capita ressession and the only reason why the economy has grown in the last 9 months has been immigration: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.abc.net.au/article/10355306...
But you're a racist if you pay attention.
Which is absolutely not happening here- the forecast balance being discussed in TFA is nuclear as a 10% foundation of largely renewable future.
On another sidenote, it's important to be extremely cynical about people re-framing pragmatic discussions about low level nuclear usage as "nuclear to the exclusion of other things".
Australia currently has vast amounts of renewables, and has a future that will see generation of exported renewable power for SE Asia .. and yet there is a place in Australia for base nuclear power to replace a small part of base gas and coal - and that's the opinion of someone who's accepted AGW models since the early 1980s and rarely votes for the Australian right.
* Australia is one of the most anti-nuclear-power countries in the world. At this point we're one of the few advanced countries left that doesn't have a nuclear reactor connected to the power grid. We're behind the curve on this and we should be looking at building up local experience in nuclear power.
* The right wing of Australia has been cautiously pro-nuclear since the Howard government and do little probes from time to time to see if the left have calmed down about advanced technology enough to build one yet.
* There is a lot of overlap between people who think the climate change people are not genuine and the pro-nuclear people ... but that is because the pro nuclear people have been pointing out the obvious solution from 1980 to 2020 to air pollution issues has been nuclear power and the green parties are one of the most vocal lobbies against it.
There are obvious financial risks to nuclear power, but Australia should at least enter the 20th century and have it on the table as an option. Our current policy is stupid.
> tl;dr at least some parts of the pro-nuclear-power lobby is actually just trying to end efforts to minimise climate change damage.
That is ridiculous; there is no such group. Australia doesn't even cause any climate change damage to minimise - accepting that as the goal, our contribution to global emissions rounds to zero, and we have no leadership on any useful technologies because our manufacturing sector has been knocked out of competition (arguably our terrible energy policies were one of the big contributors to this, although wages were a decisive factor).
It’s a surprisingly easy read too. More like a long blog post than a dry paper. One of the examples in there is nuclear technologies, which is what brings this up for me.
It reminded me of a lot of themes present in my design education, of political downstream effects created by apparently neutral technical decisions, and therefore the inherent responsibility of creators when putting something into the world.
Not just standard economic externalities but consequences for human interaction.
A nice flashback to university, so thanks!
For example, a whip specially-designed for the convenience of some humans to inflict coercive pain on others who can't fight back.
Or for a more sci-fi bent, imagine an array of mass-produced devices which can reduce a planetary ecosystem into decaying goo while simultaneously reporting on buried ore veins. It tells you something about the likely values and activities of those who would create and use it.
Robert Mose is mentionned midway, so I'd point out that the 99 percent invisible podcast is currently doing a book club on "The Power Broker" [0]. A lot of the issues touched here are inherently design issues, and I think the whole podcast would be a feast for anyone interested.
[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/power-broker-01-rober...
It’s always been puzzling to me that so many libertarian types love nuclear, which is a technology that tends to encourage big centralized systems and therefore big centralized powers (for many reasons). Solar and wind are much more amenable to decentralized voluntary fluid modes of social organization.
I guess small modular nukes would be better this way, but they still require a lot of security and life cycle management that tends to encourage large centralized administrative power.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/net-zero-coalition
[2] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/climate-strategies-ta...
[3] https://www.sustainability.gov/federalsustainabilityplan/emi...
Except, Wind and geothermal are more space efficient than nuclear when you look at the actual land use of current nuclear reactors. In theory it doesn’t need much space so several GW could sit on a few hundred acres. Yet, Wolf Creek Generating Station is only 1.2 GW on 9,818 acres that’s worse than many solar projects.
Which seems to be the general issue with the Nuclear industry. In theory you can say all these wonderful things, but in practice people are looking at decades of results when they are choosing to invest or not.
Nuclear doesn’t need technological breakthroughs from cutting edge research, that just leads to more delays and boondoggles. What it actually needs is efficiently run projects on time and under budget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
Or 6.5 GW on 2,300 acres?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Nuclear_Generating_Stati...
4 GW, 3,000 acres:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
Kind of odd that you'd cherry-pick the lowest wattage per acre reactor to make an example out of.
So sure, nuclear sometimes uses less land than solar nobody is seriously doubting it, the issue is it isn’t guaranteed and wind and geothermal are both vastly better from a land use perspective. Those 15 MW wind turbines don’t prevent people from farming beneath them, good luck doing anything that productive with land that close to a nuclear reactor.
Anyway, we probably need both, and we definitely need to stop burning fossil fuels, so let's not disparage one in favor of the other.
I never argued that nuclear always lost to solar, I even suggested it should be able to use less land than your examples.
I am arguing it never beats wind.
Put a turbine in the on a 10,000 acre farm and you’ll still have a 9,999 acre farm. Put a nuclear reactor on that same land and you’ll be doing a lot less farming.
which also asserts that:
and other claims.Sure, look at this picture of corn growing between windmills. https://www.gasworld.com/story/wind-turbines-and-corn-fields...
Gee I wonder how much land they are actually occupying. Or wowzers let’s talk about offshore wind farms…
They’re using a definition that makes sense in one context and then applying it in a different context where it’s meaningless. Grid operators dislike base load power, the term is actually referring to a downside that it’s pricey to turn off. Now outside of that context it sure sounds great to pair with unreliable renewable energy. Except the downside still exists and you lose lots of money when you turn it off making it a terrible option when paired with renewable energy.
Much as you yourself have down above where the amount of land owned by a company surrounding a nuclear plant is conflated to be the amount of land required by a nuclear plant.
To be clear, I picture a hybrid energy future and can easily link to pictures of sheep grazing under solar panels - I can also link to pictures of large scale solar farms that directly place solar panels on the ground, and others that elevate the panels but have no dual use of the land.
All in all area used is a bit of a side show.
No, they own/control more land, this is specifically the amount used by the nuclear power plant.
“It occupies 9,818 acres (39.73 km2) of the total 11,800 acres (4,800 ha) controlled by the owner.”
The fenced off area patrolled by armed guards isn’t freely available for other uses. Believe me if they could sell off 5,000 acres to build a subdivision the company would happily pocket that money but no the land really is being used.
is not the same as "it requires" ...
One might ask why a 1977 nuclear plant that produces relatively low power has such a large security perimeter ... that is orthogonal to power production.
In this case walls cost more money than an empty field, both give you time to shoot someone trying to cross them and they went with the cheapest option. Thus the land is in use and cannot be used for a city park or whatnot.
Why is that specific plant so far outside the norm and above the median for others?
Why do other nuclear power generation plants 'require' so much less land?
What makes Wolf so atypical?
Why do you insist on using it as a "typical" case when it clearly isn't?
Tell us more about weasel arguments.
Never said typical it’s literally the second on a list. It’s one of the few locations I’ve seen over 4,000 acres so it’s not typical, though presumably I didn’t randomly find the worst example and most didn’t include the area.
Edit: 12,000 acres + a 7,000-acre reservoir, which eliminates the need for cooling towers though it’s got 2 reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Texas_Nuclear_Generating... if you include the water behind the dam I think it’s 19,000 acres generating 2.56 net GW, exclude the water and that goes up but presumably dams also get much more land efficient.
Poking around, you can find various justifications for sites needing more or less land. Palo Verde needs a 85-acre and a 45 acre artificial ponds because of its location in a desert. Anything located near a large body of water gets that for ‘free’ and can also make use of the water as part of its security zone a double win, though not quite as much as a wind farms in the ocean. Add in multiple reactors on one location and you can really jump up the density.
Poking around at the other end there’s much smaller reactors on big sites. China has one 200MW reactor on a site with multiple planned future reactors... Which is the thing, the real world is messy you can’t just think in terms of typical or hypothetical but what’s actually used. And of course each of these sites generated zero power for years under construction and will also generate zero power for years or even decades while being decommissioned/decontaminated.
Turbines limit how close other turbines can be located, but nothing stops you using that land for other purposes. Nobody is going to complain their corn, cows, or house aren’t seeing high wind speeds.
Meanwhile the plant operator would strongly object to someone building their house inside the exclusion zone, that land is actually occupied.
The Wolf Creek station come in at 1.02 acres/GWh/year (based on 90% capacity factor)
1) current state of LCOE costs of different power generation methods
2) future LCOE evolution/drop in the relevant power generation methods
"Without nuclear, advocates say, we would need to build far more wind and solar power plants to ensure reliable supplies, doubling or tripling costs over power networks that include nuclear."
Look, if you look at last years Lazard's LCOE report, incumbent nuclear is 5x to 6x as expensive as wind and solar. So, uh, yeah, its cheaper to overproduce capacity than build nuclear. That's from point 1: the CURRENT state of LCOE.
For "new nuclear" to enter the equation in current regulatory politics and costs, it won't power up any new plants for about 10 years.
The second point about LCOE comes into play: solar/wind are STILL DROPPING in cost, and almost more significantly, grid storage will probably see the sodium-ion battery and perhaps the sodium-sulfur battery in that time, dropping storage costs by at least 50%, perhaps 80-90%.
Solar cells will likely see some multijunction silicon-perovskite cell come into production, and possibly a full perovskite cell, in addition to increased economies of scale. I would predict in 10 years the cost of a solar cell is effectively 1/3 to 1/5 of current day prices (inflation adjusted yada yada).
Wind will likely be less revolutionary, but I suspect it will drop still another 50-70% in 10 years.
Meanwhile, this is for nuke plants 10 years out, that really don't have new gen designs ready to go. I will be kind and say plants we started funding now are only 4x as expensive as current solar/wind. But by the time they get built, they will probably be 10x as expensive.
I'm sorry, I love nuclear power, it is so cool. But the nuclear industry needed to solve its problems about 20-40 years ago. It's leadership could have embraced global warming decades ago, but the leadership of nuclear is staunchly conservative, owing to a seething resentment of regulation and government oversight.
I believe there exists, possibly a LFTR, a scalable, cheap, safe, near-zero waste reactor design that can be deployed as industrial power generation and perhaps competitive grid power, when combined with regulatory reforms in the goverment.
But that design and reforms needed to happen about 25 years ago.
Now nuclear needs to hold onto its existing plants, research new reactors (US National Labs have started new nuclear research including LFTRs, again, about 25 years too late), and prepare for when solar/wind stabilize in costs such that a price can be targeted with a true new generation design.
As for grid leveling, old gen nuclear doesn't switch on or off fast enough (LFTR can, maybe pebble bed can too), but it could do "three days of storms" generation. But it still isn't as useful as say natural gas turbine for that (which obviously releases carbon).
Alas the LFTR/MSR design is still unproven for a long term industrial standpoint, and has numerous materials issues. China has an MSR up supposedly for a year or two.
It is true that regulatory barriers, NIMBY, and other politics increase costs and delay projects in nuclear, but this is also a convenient boogeyman for them to point to. If only the "magic regulatory framework" existed to let nuclear projects freely be built then... costs would still be higher than everything but coal.
The LWR just isn't competitive, and I suspect any non-breeding design that can't also transmute waste to usable fuel (LFTR can supposedly do this, I think some other breeder reactors can as well). Because waste solid fuel is either expensive to transport and "dispose" at Yucca and is a whole entire extra bunch of NIMBYism and regulatory oversight, or difficult to reform/reprocess into new fuel.
LWR only works on a small portion of Uranium ore, and even when the rods are formed from that fissile Uranium, only a fraction of the...